Panentheism

 I was quite encouraged yesterday when I downloaded a sample of a book by Simon Schama, "Citizens", which is a rather large tome on the French Revolution (not the various current ones.......but the one beginning in 1789) The encouragement were these words found at the very beginning:-

Historians have been overconfident about the wisdom to be gained by distance, believing it somehow confers objectivity, one of those unattainable values in which they have placed so much faith.

I knew at once that I was in safe hands. What fool today still believes in "objectivity" or - perhaps worse - thinks they have attained it? Anyway, I waffle as usual.

Panentheism. Another "ism" to add to so many more. But it was partly the subject of a book I have just finished on the work and thought of Carl Jung. The thrust of the book was to argue that "meaning" is inherent in Reality, and not just projected onto a blank screen by our minds (our minds being totally distinct from mass/extension)

(Which jogs the words of a zen guy from my own mind:- "If consciousness ends in the skull, how can joy exist?")

Well, the book was by a Roderick Maine and was rather good. He sought to show how Jung's investigations and various writings supported the idea of inherent meaning. Which led onto Panentheism.

Panentheism:- a particular view, or family of views, of the relationship between God (the divine) and the world (nature, the cosmos, the universe). Composed of the Greek words “pan” = all, “en” = in, and “theos” = God, the term “panentheism” means literally “a doctrine [“-ism”] that everything exists in God.” The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the belief or doctrine that God includes and interpenetrates the universe while being more than it.”

Thus, God is not "wholly other", sitting above it all, impassive. But mingles with us - in Jung's thought, with the unconscious, the archetypes.

It is the "while being more than it (i.e. the Universe)" that distinguishes it from Pantheism, which claims God and the Cosmos are totaly interchangeable. Panentheism therefore leaves room for mystery, which was important - at least to Jung.

Classic Theism - the wholly other God who brooks no rivals - has (Maine and Jung claim) led to the inevitable death of God.

The Bible does not say ‘All Gods are One’ but rather that God is One and ‘Thou shalt have no other gods …’ It does not establish a connection but rather draws a distinction....Ultimately this distinction is one between God and world. The subsequent story of disenchantment or the progressive elimination of magic from the world has been elaborated from different perspectives by various scholars—for example, in relation to the history of Western philosophy, the development of secularity, and the historiography of Western esotericism. In a nutshell: from the establishment of the exclusivist monotheism of the Bible, to the antipagan and antimagical polemics of both Catholicism and Protestantism, to the deism and rationalism of the Enlightenment, to the atheism and agnosticism of the 19th and 20th centuries, there has been overall an increasing separation of God from the world, an ever-purer sense of God’s transcendence, to the point where God has been so far removed from the world of experience as to have become for many, as famously for Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), an unnecessary hypothesis.

Sadly, the Christian Incarnation, its central claim and witness, has more often than not been reduced to a brief visit by God to this world. Walking about for thirty years or so, sometimes on water just to show how distinct He is, then leaving us again. This so as to "come back" at some indeterminate time, this time in "judgement" rather than with offers of mercy. Well so much for the unchanging, impassive, wholly other God whose "mercy endures forever".

For Panentheism, God is truly "with us", even "as us", while leaving us with a degree of mystery, being more than us as we are now. As Jung says:-

.....we must sense that we live in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong to this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

Or as someone else once said, "Man is the animal who does not know who or what we are, and that is what we are" (or something like that.....)

Well, to round off (sighs of relief from those who still remain.....) the generic definition of panentheism:

God’s being not separate from the cosmos, God’s being affected by the cosmos, and God’s being more than the cosmos

Jung elaborated (while not himself identifying with it) this equation of psychological with (specifically Christian) theological concepts in a letter to the Reverend David Cox (25 September 1957):-

instead of using the term God you say “unconscious,” instead of Christ “self,” instead of incarnation “integration of the unconscious,” instead of salvation or redemption “individuation,” instead of crucifixion or sacrifice on the cross “realization of the four functions* or of wholeness.”

* Briefly, sensation perceives that a thing exists, thinking judges what it is, intuition perceives what its possibilities are, and feeling judges its value.

My coffee is cold.